This module parses /robots.txt files as specified in "A Standard for Robot Exclusion", at <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html> Webmasters can use the /robots.txt file to forbid conforming robots from accessing parts of their web site.

The parsed files are kept in a WWW::RobotRules object, and this object provides methods to check if access to a given URL is prohibited. The same WWW::RobotRules object can be used for one or more parsed /robots.txt files on any number of hosts.

The value of this field is the name of the robot the record is describing access policy for. If more than one User-Agent field is present the record describes an identical access policy for more than one robot. At least one field needs to be present per record. If the value is '*', the record describes the default access policy for any robot that has not not matched any of the other records.

The User-Agent fields must occur before the Disallow fields. If a record contains a User-Agent field after a Disallow field, that constitutes a malformed record. This parser will assume that a blank line should have been placed before that User-Agent field, and will break the record into two. All the fields before the User-Agent field will constitute a record, and the User-Agent field will be the first field in a new record.